Google's Gmail service recently began offering users the ability to take back sent messages.

Sure, you only get five seconds to do it after you push the send button, but it could still be pretty useful in some situations. Here, we list just a few.

• While drunk, you send a wildly inappropriate e-mail to your boss detailing all the ways you plan to make him or her perform oral sex on you when you quit your job next month. Luckily, you're drinking coffee, taking a shower, sleeping, eating popcorn and doing vigorous exercise as you send the e-mail, so you sober up in three seconds. Once you have your faculties back, you see the undo button, and save yourself from thirty days of hell.


• You respond to an e-mail from PayPal (though they're using a Hotmail account for some reason), asking you for your date of birth, driver's license number, social security number, checking account number, the size of your genitals and half your organs, giving them all the information and body parts they require. Upon reflection, you realize you spelled your grandfather's middle name wrong, press undo, fix and send a corrected version.


• You send an e-mail to your wife telling her that you've been cheating on her and feel that the best course of action is probably divorce. But just after you send it, you press undo, and everything you did is magically erased from her and everyone else's memories.


• When your future self arrives in a Time Tube to stop your present self from sending an e-mail to your past self warning him or her about the impending robot apocalypse (because doing so will only make the robots stronger), it won't matter if he or she is a few seconds late.


• Without thinking, you accidentally send a Japanese scat porn picture to your dad. Before the e-mail hits the intertubes, you press undo and send him what he really wants, pictures of men in Star Trek costumes licking cole slaw off each other's hands. Your dad is weird.